Israel News

Tel Aviv — A government program to encourage volunteer work by Arab Israelis as a substitute for army enlistment enjoys wide support among the country’s one-fifth minority, despite a campaign by Arab political leaders to discourage youths from participating.

According to a survey released this week by University of Haifa sociologist Sammy Smooha, support for the national service project among Arab youths and the general Arab Israeli population runs between 75 to 80 percent.

What am I to say when people ask me, as they frequently do these days, which presidential candidate is best for Israel?
When I sometimes ask, in response, what they mean by “best for Israel,” they may think I’m being facetious or evasive, but I’m not.
So I start with recent history before examining the current Democratic and Republican candidates.
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For a Woodmere, L.I., pediatrician, the offer of a $60,000 fellowship to move her family to Israel and practice medicine there may be just what the doctor ordered.
Dr. Tamar Rosner, who practices with her mother in Brooklyn, said she had been “seriously considering” making aliyah and that learning of the fellowship and Israel’s need for physicians helped to finalize it for her. She said she, her husband and kids now plan to move to Israel this summer.

Israel was to begin cutting back electricity to the Gaza Strip late this week in addition to reducing fuel and food shipments in an effort to pressure the Hamas government there to end rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. But there was a growing belief that a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza might be the only effective way to end the attacks.
“It seems to me to be only a matter of time,” said Yitzhak Reiter of the Harry S Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.